Why is Fallout 3 and New Vegas so glitchy?

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I find that a lot of open world games are glitchy. Developers spend years just to make their games playable, when you'll be done with it in a week or two.
Fallout has huge open worlds. You can't guarantee that the developers will come across EVERY single bug, no matter how much they test it.

None. 30 hours in now, no bugs at all (playing on a recently refurbished 360).

I've been a bethesda fan since morrowind, and I've developed a habit over the years of hitting f5 (quicksave) at regular intervals... so it doesn't really bother me anymore.

Games like these should have public beta testing for this very reason. While not every bug can/or will be found, I suspect that the chances of bugs being found will be substantially higher than QA testing.

I can't even bring myself to play these games anymore even though they were a lot of fun, the same goes with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. I've been hearing excuses like "Oh it's hard to fix every glitch on such a huge game", but I don't believe that's any excuse. Many of these glitches are ridiculasly bad and often times force you to have to restart your character, which can be pretty annoying when you're already 20 hours into the game with your character.

I've decided to make a rule that I am no longer going to buy games for my 360 unless I know they don't have glitches as bad as Bethesda's games do. For some reason it seems that the linear games like Resident Evil 5 and Batman Arkham Asylum tend to have little to no glitches. So maybe it'd be a good idea if I only stuck with linear games...

I personally blame the Gamebryo engine. It doesn't like me and I don't like it.

I'm pretty sure major bugs in Fallout 3 and New Vegas have been fixed. I pre-ordered the game and it was so glitchy it was almost impossible to play. Save files became corrupted if you so much as wore the wrong hat to a location and seeing Doc Mitchell's head spin three-hundred and sixty degrees whilst he was talking was just freakish.

Bethesda claims their patches fix all the glitches, but even after downloading them on my 360 hardrive I still experience NPCs disappearing and the game freezing randomly.

are you sure your console isn't overheating? maybe it taxes your GPU more than other games?

I suspect this is the culprit as well.. I haven't heard of Fallout crash problems since they've released the various patches, and it makes sense to me that Fallout 3/NV would tax your system more than other games, with its large areas and potential for near-infinite stuff all over the place.

On the PC I don't remember FO3 or NV ever crashing on my system.. but games in general don't.. as long as you have stable hardware that is sufficiently cooled you shouldn't have many problems in general

I see a lot of people complain about games been laggy,buggy,glitchy, in particular bethesdas works like the elderscrolls or newer fallouts but to date ive never had any of the stuff people have mentioned,well except for the occasional floating tree/rock and voiceless npc. maybe im just blessed by the gaming gods

i dont really have any huge troubles, it crashes every once in awhile (every 5 or 6 hours or so, but usually in specific areas, i suspect my mods)

there are a dozen mods or so for helping with this issue, i use the comunity patches for one.
i have about 8 gb's of mods installed, ranging from teture patches to completel gameplay overhauls.
using the 3gb+ patch will allow fallout to use more than 2gb rams, this to me made a huge difference as well,

anyway if you think fallout and fnv are buggy you should see rage, they have tried cramming so many textures in there as "virtual textues" (virtual fullscreen overlays, basiclally all textures in the gae is made like this)
that you constantly see texture errors when turning the camera, so anoying

I have a simple answer. It is the law of irony. A great game comes out so of course it has to be glitchy. Having a great game without glitches is to good to be true.

The more mods you have on (PC Version only) the more likely the game is to crash, especially if you have a terrible load order.
The engine itself is buggy and Obsidian was forced to use it (As mentioned before)
The longer you play the glitchier it becomes, after 5 hours of gameplay with many mods on the game becomes unplayable due to constant CTD's. (In personal experience)
Adjusting video settings can make the game crash.
Another thing is that you might get a horrible FPS for NO REASON WHATSOEVER.

Becuase of using the Gamebyro for so long and continually adding more stuff to it with every game by Bethesda it gets continually more glitchy.
Morrowind and Oblivion were somewhat glitchy but I've never had a CTD in either of them, however I've had plenty in Fallout 3/New Vegas

Never had any problems with Bethesda games, from Morrowind to Fallout: New Vegas.

But then, i build my own boxes - i make sure the system has proper cooling and i use high quality components with large fans, i do not download spyware infested programs off the web and install them like crazy like normal people do and i am weary of installing any mods i do not need.

I had some problems with Steam that came with vegas, but Steam is pure evil and should be uninstalled with an exorcist standing by.

Then why the hell did they even use Gamebryo in the first place when they knew damn f*****g well that it was an unstable mess?

Hopefully the Creation Engine used in Skyrim won't be near as unstable. But I won't live down how Bethesda is dumbing things down yet AGAIN! There is no reason to remove more skills!